I have a suggestion that may work. The issue of defining what is "prev"
and "next" with respect to a time ordered sequence seems to be a
problem. How about defining the link relationships in terms of time -
such as "newer" and "older" or something like that. That way, the
collection returned should be either "newer" (more recent updated time)
or "older" (later updated time) with respect to the current collection
doc.

Brett Lindsley, Motorola Labs

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of James Holderness
Sent: Friday, October 14, 2005 11:09 AM
To: Mark Nottingham; Antone Roundy
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Feed History -04


Mark Nottingham wrote:
> The approach I took in -04 was to say that the pseudo-ordering
introduced 
> by the mechanism was ONLY meaningful for the purposes of
reconstituting 
> the feed; it's still up to the feed itself to  determine what the
ordering 
> of entries means (or doesn't). That  avoids a lot of problems,
although it 
> does require some careful wording.

The ordering of the entries may not matter, but the ordering of the 
documents does. Starting with the active feed document, you need to know

whether you should be following a series of "prev" links or "next" links
in 
order to traverse the archives back through time. While your feed
history 
spec used "prev" for that purpose, previous implementations of atom:link

appear to have used "next".

I can see the justification for both choices and don't particularly mind

either way. However if the final decision is to go with "prev" rather
than 
"next" I think there should at least be a note to the effect that there
may 
be existing implementations of Atom 0.3 using "next".

> Also -- I'd think that the "last" link is already covered by "self,"
no? 
> If not, there's some pretty serious confusion about what 'self'
means.

I was going to suggest that initially but I don't think it's strictly
true. 
The spec says that "self" identifies a resource *equivalent* to the 
containing element. Considering that an archived document and the active

feed document will quite likely have no entries in common I think it's a
bit 
of a stretch to claim them equivalent. "Derived" would be a better 
relationship IMHO.

Not that I care, mind you. Just pointing out that such a usage may
conflict 
somewhat with the spec.

Regards
James

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